Book 5 for 2010: "The God of Small Things"

I plucked this book off a shelf at the library based solely on its title, which intrigued me: (I think in retrospect that it reminded me of a Terry Prachett book....) "The God of Small Things," by Arundhati Roy (1997).

At any rate, it turned out to be quite a different, yet oddly similar, experience. Again, I find myself reading a story about a wildly dysfunctional family told from the perspective of a young brother and sister. Again, this family is of an ethnicity with which I have little familiarity: This family is Indian, of India, of a grindingly impoverished area on the southern-most tip of the country, what's called the "Spice Coast."

This is an amazingly convoluted story. It moves backward and forward in time; the characters have names and family names and titles and nicknames, and it is at times a bit difficult to remember who is who; and the language is rich and dense, sometimes TOO dense. I found that it often distracted me from the actual storyline. The author -- a first-time author, although with some writing experience -- uses many, many, many metaphors and made-up descriptives ("a steelshrill police whistle," "cake-crumbled voices...") and Much Use of Capitalizations.

That is not to say that it doesn't work. It does, a lot of the time. And the story she tells is, like the others I've recently read, about Life and Death, and Family and Secrets, and Love and Madness, and all those Larger Themes.

I recommend it to those who, like me, refuse to give up on a book just because the going gets a little tough. I slogged on through; you could, too.